By PAULA NECHAK, SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER

Published 10:00 pm, Thursday, January 29, 2004

There has long been a cinematic fascination with other cultures and the sparks that fly when they rub up against our westernized ideals.

In Sue Brooks' wonderful "Japanese Story," which is not western in the American sense, but the Australian, myopia and friction are pushed to an extreme: young, wired and workaholic geologist Sandy Edwards (Toni Collette) is forced to escort proper Japanese businessman Hiromitsu (Gotaro Tsunashima) into the Pilbara region of Western Australia.

His family's business offers her fledgling company the young geologist and her partner own a chance to become solvent and secure. But as in all yin and yang stories, the pair don't much like each other -- at least initially. It's not only that they don't verbally understand each other -- both come packaged with preconceived smug stereotypes and traits that irritate the other.

Only after their truck is stranded in a sand bog deep inside the desolate, scorched terra cotta of Pilbara, with nothing but the open sky to blanket them and facing environmental hardships, can they find an equilibrium that unites them and minimalizes their differences.

Director Brooks, again working from a script by Alison Tilson after their 1997 collaboration, "Road to Nhill," has a wonderful way of using the barren landscape as both seductive character and great divider.

"Japanese Story," enigmatic and routine in the first half, turns into something else all together in the second. The film takes a wholly unexpected twist and gives Collette, who won the Australian Film Institute award for best actress for her performance, the opportunity to make an emotional journey that's separate from her drive into the desert.

Collette is marvelous as a woman becoming aware of her cultural and instinctual limitations and feelings. By the time she wakes up to herself, she also is isolated within her own tribe, yet better able to stand on her own because of her unlikely friendship with Hiromitsu.

Brooks has made a movie that is about separation from convenience and having to deal one-on-one with a stranger in a strange land. The result is a profound and moving movie.